Evgeny Morozov adds his voice to the chorus questioning Big Data’s effect on creativity:
Last December, the Global Times, China’s English-language tabloid, ran a story on the local punk band Bear Warrior, which found an ingenious way to measure the audience response to their songs. Its lead singer is a graduate student majoring in precision instruments at a university in Beijing, so he designed a device—”POGO Thermometer”—that measures the intensity of the audience’s dancing through a series of sensors embedded in the floor carpet in the music hall. The signals are then transmitted to a central computer where they are closely analyzed in order to improve future performances. According to the Global Times, the band found that fans “started moving their bodies when the drums kicked in, and they danced the most energetically when he sang higher notes.” As its lead singer put it, “the data helps us understand how we can improve our performance to make the audience respond to our music like we intend.”
Perhaps, it would help improve their performance, but when did punk music become so nice? Making the audience happy is something for management consultants—not punk musicians!—to obsess about. The Sex Pistols would have only one use for that carpet and, rest assured, it wouldn’t involve sensors of any kind.
The Dish recently looked at Netflix’s data-driven creativity here.
The Dish 